The Lake County Forest Preserve District Scales Land Management Operations with GIS

The Lake County Forest Preserve District (LCFPD) protects more than 31,200 acres of land, including bluffs on Lake Michigan, flatwood wetlands, tallgrass prairies, and oak savannas and woodlands. Managing invasive species such as European buckthorn, reed canary grass, and cut-leaved teasel is important for protecting native plants and maintaining the health and biodiversity of ecosystems.

LCFPD is also responsible for prescribed burns, one of the most effective, cost-efficient ways to manage natural areas. A prescribed burn is the act of planning and implementing a carefully controlled fire in a specific location. The areas that require this measure are typically those where invasive shrubs, trees, and thick undergrowth must be controlled. This also helps prevent these forests from developing vegetation growth, which can present the risk of spreading wildfires more easily. Annually in the spring and fall, LCFPD staff perform prescribed burns on an average of 3,000 acres of land.

Since the state made LCFPD a special government unit, the county it serves has grown into the second-largest forest preserve district in Illinois. And LCFPD’s mission has expanded in importance for Illinois due to the growing necessity of prescribed burns as a method for wildfire mitigation.

For years, LCFPD staff and volunteers recorded new species by using spreadsheets and hand-drawn maps and communicated their data via email. The paper-based and slow electronic tracking methods did not let staff or leaders see how much and where they were managing invasive species. Additionally, for LCFPD’s work to manage prescribed burns, fire practitioners—also called “burn bosses”—and assigned crews had to inform neighbors by phone, email, or mailers. Updating data, collaboration among staff, and communication with the public were time-consuming and inefficient. So, LCFPD expanded its geographic information system (GIS) technology to integrate new tools specifically targeted to the challenges the agency faced.

LCFPD staff had been using GIS software for 20 years, but not specifically for natural resources management. “The manual tracking of our work using spreadsheets was disconnected and really not productive,” said Nick Spittlemeister, GIS manager for LCFPD.

LCFPD adopted ArcGIS Field Maps,  an all-in-one app that uses data-driven maps to help workers capture and edit data and track real-time locations of their daily work. The tool allows crew members to see clearly where they should go to treat project areas and where to apply herbicide in specific areas to control invasive plant species. The agency also adopted ArcGIS Survey123, a simple, intuitive mobile data collection app for land management crews. These tools aid in understanding and communicating where herbicide treatments need to occur. After the work in the field is done, staff fill out an herbicide log in ArcGIS Survey123 to track the amount and type of herbicide applied along with hours worked. The form also automatically fills in the current weather conditions for the day. In winter, crews use this same information to find areas that may need revisiting for treatment, seeding, or follow-up clearing. LCFPD now has 90 app users that include contractors, volunteers, and staff.

“GIS makes it easier for all staff and volunteers—they are able to see information at their fingertips,” said Spittlemeister.

LCFPD also used their new GIS tools to improve community outreach. “We needed to find a better way to contact residents. We wanted to understand which residents had a higher incidence of asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD),” said David Cassin, manager of landscape ecology at LCFPD. “We didn’t need to spend time reaching out to everyone if they didn’t live near the burn area.”

Accessing a public Survey123 form, residents can now add their preferred method of contact—email, text message, or phone call—for burn days. Staff then use that data in Field Maps to see a list of people who should be contacted and how, determined by their proximity to the burn area. With the integration of GIS tools, during the 2023 burn season, LCFPD staff saved 20 hours of work from not manually contacting residents.

“By geocoding all of our [residential] contacts within and being able to contact them directly from [the] Field Maps burn [form], it saves our burn bosses at least an hour of time per burn event,” said Cassin.

After the burns are conducted, data about how much acreage was burned, burn intensity, weather conditions, and where the burn happened is compiled into a post-burn report form in Survey123. The burn event polygons are then shared with the Illinois Prescribed Fire Council and added to their web mapping application for the management of prescribed burns throughout the state. 

As GIS tools have transformed LCFPD’s approach to managing invasive species, they are looking toward more areas to deploy the technology.

LCFPD hopes linear referencing will aid in their work to manage more than 200 miles of multiuse trails. Linear referencing is a way to store and geographically locate data using relative positions along a measured line without using a physical address. This allows users to measure dynamically changing attribute data—such as on a trail, roadway, or pipeline.

“[Linear referencing] will help us with rating our trails based on accessibility, keep track of maintenance and improvements, and provide routing for staff and the public,” said Spittlemeister, who emphasized how the new applications have helped empower LCFPD to better achieve its goals. “With GIS tools, we can optimize things out of the box. We’ve already realized time and efficiency savings, as well as ways to prioritize residents.”